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Originally Posted by sir_pudding
FWIW, your warrant officers make sense.
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The system functions satisfactorily in the armed forces of fifty-odd Commonwealth countries including Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa, and the UK. Also in Israel and most of the Arab states.
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OTOH, I'm less convinced that either Mayflower or the Empire would use crowns instead of a more symbolic emblem.
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Well, Mayflower certainly wouldn't — it was a republic founded upon basically American lines, though actual Americans didn't overwhelmingly dominate amongst the origins of its colonists.
As for the Empire, the crown might have been adopted as a "retro" common symbol of authority by the early Senate and imposed on the Empire to replace Eichbergerist and Mayflowerite symbols, in the early days when the Senate thought it was taking over from the trustees of Eichberger's will. That's not a very satisfactory rationalisation, but the sad truth is that the same problem applies to the words "Empire" and "Imperial". I originally adopted them back in 1989 as a way of immediately conveying a satisfactory impression to players of what the Empire
is, but that they are rather difficult to justify historically. I used to think of changing them in a revision, replacing "Empire" with "Commonwealth" or "Coalition", "Imperial Council" with "Board of Trustees", "Emperor" with "Chairman of the Board of Trustees", "Secretary-General" with "General Manager" and so forth. But the time to do that, if there was one, passed twenty years ago.
I sometimes suppose that there is a translation convention in place. Just as we do not actually play in the Spanish-Chinese-Hindi-and-Indonesian-influenced English-based creole that I suppose will have developed out of International Business English by 2959, I suppose sometimes that the actual terms in use are something derived from Mayflowerite business administration or the 24th-century successor of the UN, that would be jarring and perhaps misleading if used untranslated. It would give quite the wrong impression if the Senate (actually in continuous session using computer-mediated text debate) were called the "Annual General Meeting", the Imperial Council the "Board of Directors", the Emperor the "Chairman", and the Secretary-General the "Managing Director". Perhaps that is what is actually said in-setting, and we use "Empire" etc. because that is what is meant*. And sometimes I go further to suppose that there is an iconographic translation convention in place: that the symbol actually used is something that would be meaningless or inappropriate to us, and that it is here translated into something that conveys the correct sort of immediate impression. That's a stretch. I usually prefer to avoid talking about what the insignia and logos actually are.
But anyway, what other symbols do we have for imperial super-sovereign authority?
It could be nearly anything, an
acorn slipped and leaved… I have sometimes thought that a
phoenix arising out of flames of fire would be apt.
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What about using the emblem of the specific service here?
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It's a good idea. I have often said that the specific service badge appeared in place of the "star" place-holder in the distinction lace illustrated, and on the buttons at the top of the probationers' tabs. The problem is that it does rather ask the question as to what the symbols of the services ought to be. The only one that I have ever definitely described is the service badge of the Independent Commission for Justice.
* This would be similar to the situation with Latin Imperator which originally meant "commander (of an army)", and was adopted to avoid making a claim to monarchy, but which developed because of that adoption to mean "king of kings".